In devising his strange fictions, Mississippi’s Barry Hannah was nearer to a poet and musician than a prose writer, and his language inventions reached a peak in a 1996 short story, “Get Some Young,” from the collection, High Lonesome.

Hannah was born in 1942 in Meridian, Mississippi, and grew up in Clinton not far from the state capital, Jackson. All three of these are located in central Mississippi along Interstate 20.

Today, travelers crisscross Mississippi on I-20 (east-west) and I-55 (north-south) with hardly a flicker of the dread and uneasiness that strangers once felt making their way through the state—a region known fifty or sixty years ago as the most backwards, violent, and racist of all Southern states.

Now, of course, the interstate highway system has homogenized the entire country, and one can travel from coast to coast with nothing but the familiar names of motel and restaurant chains to reinforce the illusion of oneness.

It takes a native like Barry Hannah to exit the interstate and descend among the South’s many rural two-lane roads to confront characters who haven’t received the news that America is now one big happy family. In his Mississippi fiction, Hannah leads us deep into the woods with its unaccountable dread and profound uneasiness.

In “Get Some Young,” Hannah chose to use actual towns and place-names: towns like Mendenhall (pop. 2,500) on US 49, south of Jackson. And the Strong River, which flows into the Pearl, which itself winds southward to the Gulf of Mexico. At first glance, Hannah’s portrait of the beautiful Strong River with its sand bars and rapids, its high overlooks and Edenic forests might be mistaken for a National Geographic photo spread, but veteran Hannah readers will have their ears perked, ready for anything.

The story begins simply enough: Swanly, a beautiful youth of about seventeen or eighteen—a Mississippi Adonis—and four friends embark on a camping trip on the banks of the Strong. Soon, however, three locals—a husband and wife, and the husband’s nemesis, a river-rat woodsman—independently, operatically, and insanely fall in love with Swanly. In a further twist, young Swanly falls for the wife. She’s thirty-two, faded, haggard, but still ripely sensual. Husband and wife proceed to seduce, drug, and rape the youth—together!—even though they hate each another mortally. Much violence ensues.

When the story begins, on a car trip down to the river from Jackson, the five boys see themselves as dazzling young men—cosmopolitan, glib, decadent. They have no idea what kind of fully realized adult perversity lurks in backwoods Mississippi—they haven’t read Faulkner’s Sanctuary. “Get Some Young” is penetrated through and through with an odor of violence and danger; it’s a terrifying story to read, recalling other American horror stories—Deliverance, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” among others.

Is Hannah trying to tell us that Mississippi is still a land of terrors? I don’t know. Probably, like most Southern writers, he was deeply ambivalent about his native region. I live in Louisiana, a state with its own dismal history of poverty, racism, ignorance, violence, and corruption. Thus, I can hardly claim the moral high ground when I look across the Mississippi River to my neighbor to the east.

One summer, years ago, I was hitchhiking on I-20 from Meridian back home to Louisiana. In Jackson, a motorcyclist gave me a high-speed ride across town, via a tangle of off-ramps and on-ramps, straight through the I-55/ I-20 interchange—I’ve never been so scared in my life. When he let me off, a few miles west of Jackson, I found myself stranded on the interstate near Clinton. The day was getting long and I spied thunderstorms approaching from the east. Nearby, I could make out some kind of college or university, and so I walked there, spoke to a passing student about my problem, and he blithely said I could crash for the night in an empty dorm room. The place was Mississippi College, from which Barry Hannah graduated in 1964.

When Hannah died in 2010 at age sixty-seven, he was a professor of creative writing at Ole Miss. He had been steadily accruing a national reputation since his first novel, Geronimo Rex (1972). He was the author of eight novels and five collections of short stories. His honors and awards include the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a PEN/Malamud Award, a Robert Penn Warren Lifetime Achievement Award, a Guggenheim, and on and on.

In “Get Some Young,” the husband lusting to possess Swanly is named Tuck, a middle-aged store owner, who has watched the boys growing up on their annual camping trips to the river. Tuck lives with his wife, Bernadette, in a house behind the store, in a marriage based on delicately cultivated contempt. Loathing is Tuck’s default spiritual state: loathing of himself, his wife, his two grown sons, and the rest of the world. He should have died of despair long ago save for periodic jolts of attraction to some adolescent like Swanly. Tuck was a scoutmaster once, we learn with a shudder.

When Hannah places us inside Tuck’s brain, the effect is vertiginous and horrifying, as if we were listening to the Marquis de Sade channeled by some Mississippi Caliban, recently trained to speak:

There was Swanly in the pool, the blond hair, the tanned skin. Who dared to give a south Mississippi pissant youth such powerful flow and comeliness? Already Tuck in his long depressed thinking knew the boy had no good father; his home would stink of distress. . . . A boy like that you had to take it slow but not that much was needed to replace the pa, in his dim criminal weakness. You had to show them strength then wait until possibly that day, that hour, that hazy fog of moment when thought required act, the kind hand of Tuck in an instant of transfer to all nexus below the navel, no more to be denied than those rapids they’re hollering down, nice lips on the boy too.

That shattering final line, “nice lips on the boy too,” is simply unwriteable. Sorry, MFA candidates, there’s no learning how to write a line like that. Hannah’s oblique, febrile new language flowered in his seminal collection, Airships (1978), where the typical narrator was a Mississippi male with love troubles. Written about twenty years after Airships, “Get Some Young” is an example of Hannah’s late hieroglyphic style; it contains no quotation marks, no transitions. Settings and points-of-view change suddenly, without the usual markers like numbering or headings, devices that give a reader a chance to catch his breath, to sigh, before diving into a new patch. You don’t read “Get Some Young”; you re-read it; two times, then a third, maybe a fourth, straining every muscle to try to decipher Hannah’s quicksilver prose, which seems to be written in an unknown language, a private Esperanto or Barryanto, a variant of English.

Hannah was born on April 23, Shakespeare’s and Nabokov’s birthday. He shares a taste with the bard for hyperbole and violence. There’s even an eye-gouging scene in “Get Some Young”—perhaps an homage to “Out, vile jelly!” in King Lear. As for Nabokov, “Get Some Young” reminds us of Lolita; both tales are the love-confessions of a maniac. In his obsessive love for Swanly, Tuck is a Mississippi Humbert Humbert, minus the European hauteur, irony, and about a hundred IQ points. Otherwise, in his apoplectic rage against freeloaders and a world going to the dogs, Tuck is Jason Compson in The Sound and the Fury. In his homicidal isolation, he’s Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Hannah, like all great fiction writers, is an astute psychologist—although one groans to imagine the strain placed upon an author’s faculties when channeling a monster like Tuck.

Hannah is also sidesplittingly funny. His oeuvre is full of comic madmen. (Well, it takes a couple of readings to find the humor in “Get Some Young.”) It seems that at the beginning of his career, Hannah knew that the Southern grotesque was a dead device—he had absorbed all previous Gothic weirdities: Edgar Allen Poe, Flannery O’Connor, Sanctuary, Deliverance, Cape Fear, even Erskine Caldwell and Harry Crews—and then decided to double down and take the grotesque to another level via his inscrutable, violent, hallucinatory comic riffs.

Along with tortured lovers, gun-owners, and the insane, Hannah’s favorite characters are musicians. One of Swanly’s camping buddies, Walthall, has brought his viola to the river. Another, Arden Pal, has brought a flute. Swanly needs no instrument since he is himself music (or erotic love which here is the same thing). Two other boys, Lester Silk and Bean, make up the troupe. At times it is hard to distinguish the boys, since Hannah focuses so intensely on Swanly. All five are boy/men, obsessed with “music, weapons, girls, books, drinking, and wrestling . . .” They are quintessential Hannah-males, cocksure, desperate—aesthetes dreaming of valor and violence. Swanly, in particular, feels caught between worlds, between boyhood and adulthood, between innocence and precocious despair.

The river-hermit who spies on them is named Sunballs. He’s an unwanted frequenter of Tuck’s country store, and he happens to peep through a window at the very moment that Tuck and Bernadette are ravishing the youth. The sight leaves him “bewitched like a pole-axed angel.” The love triangle has now become a quadrilateral, and (perhaps sensing that the reader is likewise pole-axed) Hannah rapidly brings all the players to the river’s edge for a climactic scene, Deliverance-style—the boys splashing in the water and the lovesick Tuck gouging Sunballs’ eyes, then receiving a knife in the gut in return. The boys rescue Swanly and lead him tenderly back to camp like a casualty of war. . . . Curtain.

Well, not quite. Readers pause, reeling with shock, while Hannah sketches in two or three sentences of epilogue. (Tuck, we learn with gratitude, is dead.)

And the story’s meaning? . . . Is there a meaning we can take from this unprecedented catastrophe on the Strong River? I wouldn’t begin to offer an interpretation for a tour de force like “Get Some Young,” which is a vision of Mississippi that I doubt the state’s tourist board will select for its brochures, a far cry from a genteel visit to Eudora Welty’s house in Jackson or a tour of William Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak in Oxford.

And yet . . .

Bernadette, oddly enough, has the last scene in the story. We meet her in the epilogue fourteen years after the camping trip. She is now an insane, shattered ancient hag, still tending the store, and, when someone asks her about Swanly, she “began to scream without pause.”

Yet how curious that her wretchedness reminds us of the moment fourteen years earlier when she first laid eyes on Swanly: “Out of the south Mississippi fifth-grown pines, the rabbitweed, the smaller oaks and hickories, the white clay and the coon-toed bracken, she felt away on palisades over a sea of sweetening terror.”

Is Hannah trying to have it both ways? Beauty and violence? I have no idea, but that brief description of the state of Mississippi is as radiant a sentence as anything in literature.

William Caverlee is a contributing editor for The Oxford American Magazine and the author of Amid the Swirling Ghosts and Other Essays. He has written for numerous magazines and literary journals including The Christian Science Monitor, Louisiana Cultural Vistas, The Florida Review, and The Cimarron Review. His previous appearances in Literary Traveler include profiles of authors Henry Miller, Thomas Merton, John Kennedy Toole, and Hal Roth.

Main image (and top image) by Miguel Vieira, second image by David Carroll.

]]>http://www.literarytraveler.com/articles/barry-hannahs-late-love-song-to-mississippi-get-some-young/feed/0Letters To The Places We Miss The Most: Marlborough, New Zealandhttp://www.literarytraveler.com/travel-2/letters-to-the-places-we-miss-the-most-marlborough-new-zealand/
http://www.literarytraveler.com/travel-2/letters-to-the-places-we-miss-the-most-marlborough-new-zealand/#respondMon, 23 Mar 2015 18:41:05 +0000http://www.literarytraveler.com/?p=9350Dear Marlborough, New Zealand,

Last week, I was in a wine shop and saw your name on a Sauvignon Blanc label. I admit I was looking for it. I never liked white wine until I met you. I buy your bottles all the time now, bring them to dinner parties, drink them with my husband, drink them alone. It sounds like I’m stalking you, and maybe, it’s a good thing you’re 9,000 miles away.

Do you remember when we met in February 2012? It was your summer—my winter. I knew little about you. My husband, Rich, and I (my boyfriend at the time) drove from Nelson to see you. Our friends let us borrow their Bongo van. I can’t even remember why we picked you—there were so many other places our guidebook said we should go. On the way, we stopped at Nelson Lakes National Park. We jumped off a pier into the cold and crystal Lake Rotoiti, snowcapped mountains looming in front of us. Barely two hours later, we reached you.

The road through your heartland quieted us. As we drove, I couldn’t take my eyes off you: The dry brush along the pull-offs, the never-ending green of your vineyards, the hills beyond, and the mountains even more beyond. I don’t remember a single other vehicle behind us or in front. We were alone (or maybe you made us feel that way). We stopped to take your picture. The pictures are so quiet. No one can ever hear what’s in a picture, so I want people to know this. The most beautiful places silence us. I don’t even remember having thoughts, always the loudest force in me. I can speak for both Rich and me—we were nothing and everything that day with you.

We stayed the night in a B&B in Blenheim, ready to see more of you in the morning. Other tourists recommended we rent bikes and pedal from winery to winery, but we didn’t listen. Mostly because we thought it might rain (a rare kind of day for you). And really, when you’re drinking and eating cheese and nuts and charcuterie between the hours, who wants to exert themselves? We walked through several of your cellar doors—Cloudy Bay, Georges Michel, Villa Maria, Auntsfield. I was set on trying all your reds, your Pinot Noirs, but then, you changed me. You didn’t say anything. You showed me your whites in sparkling glasses. No one has shown me their whites before. Not like this. Your Sauvignon Blancs were smooth and not annoying and played jazz music. I don’t even like jazz; I just like my idea of it. Maybe your Blancs had hints of right ideas, and that’s what I was tasting.

We were in your Wairau Valley, created millions of years ago by the whims of glaciers and earthquakes. We drove down dusty roads to find your cellars, lush vines on either side of us. I remember thinking how well-loved you looked. There are people who pay great attention to your soil, who sell your wine in clean and understated buildings, who pass on their love for you across generations. Connoisseurs discuss the secret to your yellow-green and violet grapes. They talk about diurnal temperature variation—your long days of sunshine, your ocean breeze and cool nights. They talk about your stony, dry soil. They call your wine “aromatic” and “herbaceous.” They go on about your long ripening season, and I can’t help but wonder if this is why I like you so much—I fall for late bloomers.

We drank your beer, too. We stopped by the Moa Brewing Company. I remember playing darts there with Rich, the cute bartender, her friendly pours, the chats with other tourists. A couple there convinced us to drive to Milford Sound, thirteen hours away from you. We ended up making the trip, days later in the Bongo, with our friends in Nelson. I’m not sure we would have ever made it there if it weren’t for you. My love for Milford doesn’t take away from the love I have for you. They say certain things happen because you were at the right place at the right time. You were the right place, Marlborough.

I remember smiling a lot and not caring when it did rain later. Do you know how fun you are in the rain? Your rain was light and cold and disappeared, like you just wanted to show us, and that was it. I guess by then I wasn’t surprised by your surprises. I don’t make friends easily, let alone within a span of two days. What is it about you? I still talk about you.

I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again. Rich and I have been in love for a long time. I see you as a part in our mystery, an indelible setting in our story.

Whether you are a Canadian who has enjoyed a Cuban beach holiday or an American who has looked with longing at that alluring but off-limits island only 90 miles off the coast of Florida, we promise you a behind-the-scenes immersion into a neighbouring culture that both confounds and intrigues us.

Cuba’s culture is a mixture of often contradicting influences. The island is a meeting point of Spanish, African, French, and Asian cultures. Since 1959, the Cuban Revolution has greatly affected even some of the most basic aspects of daily life. How does the irrepressible Afro-European vibrancy and spontaneity of a tropical and Catholic island square with conformist, and atheist Soviet-style communism?

We will explore what it was like to grow up in Cuba as the last generation of citizens raised with Fidel Castro in charge of their country and how ordinary Cubans perceive themselves and their future. On a positive note, violent crime is low, literacy high, and healthcare universal. However, the one-party state has imposed limitations on many freedoms, including expression and travel. And the fall of the Soviet Union brought an end to the subsidies that kept the Cuban economy afloat up to the nineties, which has caused the country severe economic hardships it is still grappling with.

Predictions that the island would undergo a rapid transformation in the manner of China or Vietnam, let alone the former Soviet bloc, have proved false. But Cuba does look much different today than it did 20 years ago, or even as recently as 2006, when illness compelled Fidel Castro to step aside. Far from treading water, Cuba has entered a new era, the features of which defy easy classification or comparison to transitions elsewhere.

We will break down barriers that have kept us apart as we build relationships with Cubans from all walks of life in the places they live, work, worship, and play. We will soak up the environment of colonial, art deco, and contemporary architecture. We will savour the country’s hugely popular and influential music. We will meet local artists. We will discuss Cuban poetry and literature with some of the island’s most articulate writers.

We will experience Cuba in three distinct locations. Havana, of course, the big and beautiful capital. Trinidad is a perfectly preserved Spanish colonial town located on the Caribbean coast near the Escambray Mountains. The small city of Cienfuegos has been declared by UNESCO to be the best extant example of the 19th-century early Spanish Enlightenment implementation in urban planning.

Interested in finding new books for you adventures? Like Kramer’s coffee table book that turns into a coffee table, Bookniture is furniture that collapses into the size of a hardcover art book, hiding the perfectly functional into a small discrete package. Perfect for picnics, adventures, and maybe an impromptu tea party, carrying a piece in your bag means there will always place to rest a book or a drink (or even yourself). The brainchild of Hong Kong-based designer Mike Mak, the makers of Bookniture encourage creativity in using their creation. As they say on their website: “Stack it up and make a table and chair set; Add a wood board on top of 2 Booknitures to make it a bench; Stack a few layers more and it becomes a shelf! Possibility with Bookniture is endless, as long as you don’t limit your imagination!”

Not just practical but also rather stylish, the book-seat combo weighs just under two pounds and comes in two colors. It looks like an origami ottoman when expanded, and can be used with a neat felt cover for maximum comfort. The Kickstarter campaign for Bookniture ended today, but don’t fear! Having recieved contributions in upwards of $400,00 more than their target, the creators are taking orders. It’s available for pre-order now, so if you like books of all kinds you can purchase directly from their website.

Approaching my first Christmas in Manchester, UK, I bellied up to the bar in my favorite Portland Street pub. The Fab Cafe had been my regular hangout for weeks by that point. Its walls were covered with sci-fi knickknacks and posters from old cult films like Barbarella. There was a life-sized Dalek in the corner. Even in a new city, in a strange country, I’d never felt more at home.

“I need to send something back for Christmas,” I announced. “My mom is hard to shop for, but I figure I can send her something, you know, Manchester-y.”

The bartender, a large man with an ironic beard of godlike proportions, nodded thoughtfully. Then he suggested, “How about we just send her Morrissey? Just wrap him up and ship him off.” Everyone at the bar shared a laugh, commenting on how they’d be happy to have him gone, he was so annoying, they hated his music, and so on.

An hour later, the DJ had set up and the room was dancing and singing happily. The first song played was “Ask” by The Smiths, from the World Won’t Listen collection. It wasn’t the only song from Morrissey I heard played that night.

As they struggled to rebuild in the dour days after World War II’s blitzes, and later through the stifling policies of the Thatcher government, the people of Manchester always turned to music. The city has birthed many musicians over the years, starting with 1960s acts Herman’s Hermits, The Hollies, and Davy Jones of The Monkees. The 1970s produced diverse groups like the disco Bee Gees and the punk rock Buzzcocks.

Manchester’s grip on the UK’s musical taste was consolidated in the 1980s, in what was called the “Madchester” scene. This time is best known for Mancunian bands like Joy Division, The Stone Roses, and the Happy Mondays. This era in the city’s history, when drug use began to escalate and night clubs turned from live acts to DJs, is chronicled in the 2002 film 24 Hour Party People.

The city has continued to produce musicians, including contemporary acts like the Gallagher brothers of Oasis, The Chemical Brothers, and the Ting Tings. But despite the competition, Manchester has always been most associated with the Moz.

By most accounts, Steven Patrick Morrissey is the most well-known Mancunian. The pop singer was the front man for The Smiths, an integral alternative rock band active in the mid-1980s, and has continued in a solo career since the group separated. As much as it’s known for its football clubs, namely Manchester United, I was surprised to see how much of the city is inundated with Moz merchandise. He’s practically their primary export.

In his 2013 book Autobiography, Morrissey tells of his time growing up in the city. He paints a vulgar picture of Dickensian squalor and decay. As a poor child in a large immigrant family, he saw the worst of the city at the city’s worst time. Every childhood home is described a rotting slum, each teacher more interested in punishment than educating, and prison was viewed as an inevitability for all. “More brittle and less courteous than anywhere else on earth,” he writes, “Manchester is the old fire breathing its last, where we all worry ourselves soulless, forbidden to be romantic.” But Morrissey survives his time within the city limits and, as soon as The Smiths sign their record deal, he pays off a “lavish domestic phone bill of £80″ and moves to London.

Much had changed by late 2011, when I came to the city. Some rougher elements remained, sure, but the city center had transformed. My Manchester was a much more modern, welcoming place. The streets were cleaner, the people more polite. Never once, when entering a record store on Hilton Street, did I feel as if the building would collapse in on me, despite the warnings in Moz’s book.

Though many people were happy to discount his music and career, I also found quiet pride in their native son. There were no shortage of guidebooks pinpointing famous locations associated homegrown musicians, namely Morrissey. I found t-shirts reproducing the album covers of The Smiths in most stores, but seldom saw them worn around town. I resisted the urge to buy one, feeling it would make me look like a tourist.

Every day I walked past a large graffiti mural of the singer with a misappropriated quote of his lyrics: “Skateboarders of the world unite and take over.” The song had called on “shoplifters” instead, but I doubted Moz would mind.

*****

Morrissey has a strange relationship with his hometown. Though they’ll sell the t-shirts, Mancunians haven’t always enjoyed the spotlight his controversial personality have shown on them. Since the very start of his musical career, Morrissey hasn’t been shy about voicing his opinion on politics, the Queen, vegetarianism, or anything else. He’s been regarded as an overdramatic blowhard, borderline unbearable, even by his biggest supporters.

He’s well aware of this. InAutobiography, he writes, “Whenever I’d overhear how people found me to be ‘a bit much’ (which is the gentle way of saying the word ‘unbearable’), I understood why. To myself I would say: Well, yes of course I’m a bit much — if I weren’t, I would not be lit up by so many lights.”

At his own admission, Morrissey has never expected to be liked. But maybe those outrageous things he occasionally says really are fanning the flames of his stardom. Though not necessarily in his hometown, he’s never been more famous. And in Manchester, this has led to a surprising side effect: “Moz Tourism”.

Morrissey fans (called Mozophiles) have been coming to the city for years now to see the places that formed his impressionable youth. Familiar backdrops are available for fans to recreate iconic images from album booklets. Also available are landmarks from lyrics, like the Holy Name Church from “Vicar in a Tutu” and the Southern Cemetery from “Cemetery Gates”. HM Prison Manchester is better known as the “Strangeways” prison from the album title Strangeways, Here We Come. The city is littered with music venues, both active and retired, that once hosted shows by the Smiths or Morrissey as a solo act. These, along with former childhood homes and hangouts, have been assembled into walking excursions or bus tours for sightseers. Fans from all over the planet have come to see where it all began.

There is some horrible truthfulness to Morrissey’s songs that manage to capture the zeitgeist of the young.

*****

I never came across any of these pilgrims. Despite niche markets like the Mozophiles, most visitors only come around for football. A cozy silence descends when the streets aren’t full of drunken supporters flapping their colorful scarves. Things can feel sleepy, even in the city’s center. Everyday is like Sunday, provided there isn’t match on.

In my time in Manchester, I heard only one other American accent, and it was asking for directions to a hotel. My own accent became a point of fascination to the people I’d meet. Was I really American? Was I a student? What was I doing there? Eventually, during late nights in brick-lined basement bars, I began concocting elaborate lies. “Witness protection scheme,” I’d tell them. Or, “I’m a secret agent.”

The truth was notably less interesting. I’d found an online job and I could do it from anywhere, and I’d always wanted to see England. After a few long weeks in London, I was ready for something quieter (which is the gentle way of saying the word ‘cheaper’). I may as well have thrown a dart at a map. I went to Manchester because it was another English city I could name off the top of my head.

What brought me to Morrissey’s music is similarly devoid of drama. Unlike untold numbers of disaffected and misunderstood youth, I hadn’t discovered Meat is Murder or Bona Drag in a musty record shop. I’d never been that sympathetic ear to his poetic lyrics, never felt comforted by his promises of an artful, cultured, asexual world outside of my high school. Instead, I’d begun listening just weeks before I moved to his hometown.

I was drawn to his vocal stylings that seemed to dare its listeners to turn it off. I loved his attitude, his ostentation. But more than that, I loved his lyrics.

There is some horrible truthfulness to Morrissey’s songs that manage to capture the zeitgeist of the young. The world his lyrics paint is unfeeling and unfair. Every hurt he describes is jagged and heartrending. Every joy is a stomach-churning zephyr, every love is red hot and breathless until its inevitable implosion. No one writes the way young people feel like Morrissey. He will always have admirers, imitators, and inspirees because there will always be young people reaching for understanding in their pop music and somehow, impossibly, he’ll be there to take their hand.

I was a Morrissey fan, I realized. I just worried I’d discovered him too late.

*****

Eventually, I too had to make the ultimate Morrissey trip. I boarded a bus and traveled along Mancunian Way to the A57, disembarking a mere block’s walk from the Salford Lad’s Club.

The club building has a long history. The organization was founded at the turn of the 20th century as a boy’s club, a place of recreation in a troubled part of Greater Manchester, by Robert Baden-Powell, the man who would go on to form the Boy Scouts. Over the past 100-plus years, the Lad’s Club has played a pivotal role in the lives of many famous Mancunians, from musicians and footballers to actors like Albert Finney.

The Salford Lad’s Club is perhaps best known for its inclusion in the artwork for The Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead album. In the infamous shot, Morrissey, Johnny Marr, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce pose in front of the club’s doorway, with its name in plain view. This image inspires tourists to come and cross their arms like Morrissey beneath the sign. Inside is a room dedicated to pictures and memorabilia from Morrissey and The Smiths. To this day, Salford Lad’s Club is considered one of the most recognizable buildings in the United Kingdom. The picture itself was added to the collection at London’s National Portrait Gallery in 2004.

Salford, like much of Manchester, has cleaned up over the years. That corner of Coronation Street is clean and quaint, though still not overly inviting. The BBC North complex has recently moved within walking distance, providing a welcome influx of money and attention. The club has gone through some rough times, though. In 2007, a campaign to restore the building was stalled due to vandalism. Morrissey surprised the club with a donation of £20,000, earning the rare bit of positive press from the Manchester Evening News.

I came to the club on a Sunday afternoon and looked up at the blunted brick corner. The building was shuttered, the lights inside extinguished. A weathered sign on the exterior showed a thermometer, only half of it red, marking the current level of donations needed to keep the club in business. The sign didn’t look like it’d been touched in a while. Come to think of it, neither did the doors or windows. I smiled for my picture but I was stricken with worry that I’d missed out again.

*****

In the end, I resisted the urge to send something Morrissey-related to mother. That would’ve required explaining who he was, what his appeal was, which are things I’m still not confident I can properly do. I mailed her something appropriately Manchester-y: a Manchester United scarf. When I came back, though, I did burn my parents a copy of The Queen is Dead.

The Salford Lad’s Club is still open, thankfully. Despite a troubling announcement about Morrissey undergoing tests for cancer, he is still touring and releasing new albums. Autobiography was a hit; Moz has even stated begun he’s working on a novel to follow it up. His fame is spreading wider and wider, seemingly through word of mouth and random discovery alone.

As occasionally infuriating as he may be to his hometown, Morrissey plays an important role in the history of music and a pivotal part in the lives of his fans. He offers himself as a shining beacon, both someone who understands his listeners, and someone so cultured and sensitive they can strive to become. The world can be a sad, dark place to many out there. But if Morrissey has told us anything, it’s that, “There is a light and it never goes out.”

Saga Vol. 1 opens with a singular image of a woman’s face. Her teeth clenching together, sweat pops off her forehead and a small sentence snakes across the top of the page stating, “This is how an idea becomes real.” The reader is never fully informed on the idea, but turning the page, one can assume. The woman is giving birth—as expected. And she has what looks like dragonfly wings protruding from her upper back—as not expected. The man who she is screaming at emerges from underneath her skirt in the panel below, revealing a glowing and doting soon father-to-be. He has curly goat horns coming out of either side of his head. The narration snakes again, “But ideas are fragile things.”

Saga Vol. 1 is a fantasy romance graphic novel and if you’re not open to this level of geekery, don’t bother reading further. Because Saga is dragonfly wings and goat horns. It’s humans with TV heads, spidery monsters, unicorn women, spaceships, sex, murder, child prostitution and a fairly sizable galactic war. Saga is a lot. To the non-fantasy fan, it encapsulates the word “campy” and then some.

We couldn’t expect anything less from writer Brian K. Vaughan whose storytelling brought comic book fans classics like Y: The Last Man (a dystopian science fiction comic series about the last man on earth) and Ex Machina (a story about the world’s first and only superhero who is elected Mayor of New York City after 9/11). The Saga series has been praised by fans around the globe as Vaughan’s best work yet. Vaughan teams up with illustrator Fiona Staples whose gritty and vulgar visual style brings Vaughan’s 2-dimensional dialogue to life. Their pairing is a good reminder of the collaborative effort involved in graphic story telling. Staples’ images breathe life into Vaughan’s story. Just as Vaughan’s words illuminate Staples’ pictures. One without the other would be, well, quite boring.

This co-dependence is appropriately paralleled with the story they are telling. Saga mirrors the epic love stories of our time. It has garnered constant comparisons to Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and Romeo and Juliet. Saga is the story of two star-crossed lovers on the run from their warring homelands. The screaming mother from the first page, Alana, is from the planet Landfall, which is the largest planet in the galaxy. Marko, her annoyingly sweet and liberal husband, is from Wreath, Landfall’s moon. They are from two very different cultures that have been at war with each other for so long that the origin of the conflict is a little blurry.

Alana and Marko met on the planet Wreath, where Marko had been taken prisoner. Alana was his guard. They fell in love and deserted, which got them into a whole lot of trouble with their respective planets. But they ran and kept running regardless of who was chasing them and their love grew. Saga Volume 1 is a short snippet of their journey and covers roughly the first two weeks of their child’s life. It’s a rather busy two weeks as the family is being viciously hunted as they cross the planet Wreath attempting to escape.

As a fan of all three of the previously mentioned epic tales, I don’t consider Saga on par. Its characters and dialogue have a tendency to be too predictable and the story moves too easily through difficult moments that deserve more depiction of struggle. Alana and Marko’s love feels, to me, too easy in the face of the chaos that surrounds them. But this is, of course, how Saga distinguishes itself from the other stories its been compared to.

Saga’s most successful point is that love wins. In Saga Vol 1 love transcends boundaries of war and culture with ease. Alana and Marko’s struggles are lessened by the strength of their love. And we know that love ultimately wins because the story is narrated by Hazel, the child Alana gives birth to in the first scene. Hazel notes at some point in her narration that she is alive in the future and is living in a better world. So regardless of what happens after, Saga Vol 1 ends with the reader understanding love ultimately triumphs. Ideas may be fragile things in this story, but love is not.

If you’re looking to fall down the rabbit hole of beatified vintage volumes, Boston’s oldest bookstore Brattle Book Shop will keep you enthralled for hours. They specialize in lovely pre-loved books, especially classic editions and first editions. Not pandering to the casual consumer of paperback fiction, prepared to be dazzled by floors of gilt spines and long forgotten hard covers that never graced a best-seller list (and perhaps are all the better for it). One of America’s oldest bookshops—the Brattle Book Shop been in operation since 1825—it is located in the heart of downtown Boston, just steps away from other must-visit attractions, including the Boston Common and the Boston Opera House.

Reasonably priced and often gorgeous, book lovers will be tempted to purchase a tall stack of well-worn books that will feel as good in hand as on a bookshelf. You probably won’t be able to find something specific, but it never hurts to ask the booksellers, who are knowledgeable but brusque in that stereotypical Boston fashion. They do not have any qualms about letting you browse for hours, nor carrying around stacks of thing you can’t afford. Just be gentle with the spines and respectful of other patrons.

If the weather is right, one of the most unique qualities of Brattle Book Shop will stop you before you reach the door. Lining the walls of the empty lot next door are shelves of books, which are covered when the store is closed or in inclement weather. But it takes more than a drizzle to get them to cover up, so never fear: a few puddles won’t keep you from the immense selection out of doors. Find everything from semi-dated coffee table books to gorgeous classics that look like props from a Wes Anderson movie. Lose yourself in nature tomes from the 1800’s and faded guides to palmistry. If you are denied the pleasure of open air browsing, there are still multiple floors indoors.

Inside, the Brattle Book Shop has two floors of general used books, one floor reserved for rare books and antiques. If you’ve got too many used books on your house and want to sell something really special, Brattle buys as well as sells the good stuff. An experienced buyer is available from 9:00 am-5:00 pm. They also sell and buy everything from whole libraries to single volumes.

The shop has a twitter account and Facebook page you can follow for updates on their new arrivals, bookstore events, and local happenings. It’s the perfect place to stop in and browse; what you find will always surprise and thrill you. It can be a dangerous place to be for a book lover, with hard covers so reasonably priced. Be wary and come with a budget, or you may wonder out with a stack of first editions and no money for rent.

Trover is an image-hosting app created by the founder of Expedia. In this age of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter (and Tumblr and Pintrest and…) you’d be forgiven if the first sentence of this article caused you to want to click away. But wait! Trover is an image-hosting app for travelers. It is specifically formulated to operate as a community-based guidebook. Images are tagged and thus searchable by location, allowing you to virtually travel to the location you’re planning on eventually actually traveling to. While other image sharing apps such as Instagram and Pintrest allow you to search by location, they are not entirely focused on travel. Trover’s feed for a certain location won’t be full of selfies, only suggested travel sites.

Trover doesn’t just offer geotagged images of things you should do, places you should go, and things you should eat. Most of the images are also accompanied by quick write-ups explaining the pictures. While the pictures are there to entice your interest, these bits of text are the best sources of information. They help to explain that the beach you are looking at is also a historical pirate’s den, or that the wood-covered bar in the photograph is world famous for their home-brewed beer.

The app is a hybrid between image-sharing and a collaborative guidebook. Using other users input, you can create your own lists of destinations you want to check out. This makes for a much more diverse experience than a guidebook, giving you access to locations that would potentially be skipped over. Drawing on the collaboration possible with social media, the app allows you to create your own personal guidebook. Trover is available on Android and iOS, as well as in your web browser.

]]>http://www.literarytraveler.com/gear/we-recommend-this-app-trover-a-social-network-for-travelers/feed/0The 2015 Literary Fauxscars: The Results are In!http://www.literarytraveler.com/books/the-2015-literary-fauxscars-the-results-are-in/
http://www.literarytraveler.com/books/the-2015-literary-fauxscars-the-results-are-in/#commentsMon, 02 Mar 2015 14:55:45 +0000http://www.literarytraveler.com/?p=9266Every year, the staff of Literary Traveler has a lot of fun watching and discussing the year’s best (and not-so-great) literary adaptations. From contemporary fiction favorites such as Gone Girl to non-fiction juggernauts like American Sniper, it has been an exceptional year for adaptation.

While The Imitation Game took home Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars, besting American Sniper, Inherent Vice, The Theory of Everything and Whiplash*, how will it fare with our own LT Academy?

We rolled out the red carpet and donned our most elegant sweatpants for the occasion. Join us as we toast to this year’s winners!

“Julianne Moore gives an impressive and emotional performance as Alice Howland. The film (and book on which it is based) handles a delicate subject in beautiful and brave ways. Moore was extremely deserving of the Oscar — and, of course, the Fauxscar.” Francis McGovern, Founder

And the Fauxscar goes to… Stephen Hawking and Jane Wilde, The Theory of Everything

“If you pay any attention to cosmology, it isn’t a spoiler that the perfect equation to marry the two disparate strands of physics was never found. In the same way, it shouldn’t be a spoiler for a movie so focused on real people that Jane and Steven don’t find an absolutely perfect love. Yet, in their search for perfection, they find a sort of real love that’s all the more precious for its reality.” Alex Nicoll, Contributer — Read the review

Best Cinematography & Production Design:

Nominees: The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part I, Guardians of the Galaxy, Noah, Divergent, X-Men: Days of Future Past

And the Fauxscar goes to… The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

“Making full use of the new variety of optics available to filmmakers, the theater experience was impressive and deserving of recognition. With this sixth and final installment of Peter Jackson’s devoted Tolkien adaptions, the franchise was given a grand send off by its enthusiastic fans, outselling all other Lord of The Rings and Hobbit installments at the box office. ” Haley Houseman, Contributor

Best “Young Adult” Adaptation:

Nominees: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part I, The Maze Runner, The Giver,Divergent, The Fault in Our Stars

And the Fauxscar goes to… The Fault in Our Stars

“I don’t usually go for sappy movies. The Fault in Our Stars is just such a great book. The romance is believable and sweet—filled with teenage earnestness and adult lessons.” Katy Kelleher, Editor

“Overall, the issues raised in this movie are worth thinking and talking about, and the film brings them up in thoughtful and powerful ways.” Antoinette Weil, Contributor — Read the review

Best “Guilty Pleasure” Adaptation:

Nominees: Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, The Best of Me, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part I, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, I, Frankenstein, Guardians of the Galaxy

And the Fauxscar goes to… Guardians of the Galaxy

“Quite possibly the most fun movie I saw last year. I went into Guardians of the Galaxy expecting to be bored (I admit, my boyfriend convinced me to see it) and left with a stomachache from laughing so much. I don’t really even consider this a guilty pleasure. The characters are smartly done.” Katy Kelleher, Editor

“The book and the movie are different entities, and whether you like one or the other more, they both work individually, as well as together. Coming into the film with knowledge of the characters from the novel will give you a different experience than someone who hasn’t met them yet. However, whether met on page or screen, Nick and Amy captivate us by taking on a complex and disturbingly provocative life of their own.” Wesley Sharer, Contributor — Read the review

AND

Inherent Vice

“Anderson’s film is a spot-on visual representation of Pynchon’s novel, successfully translating the mood and tone of Pynchon’s unique writing style while maintaining the dreamy illogical plotting of his narrative structure. Joaquin Phoenix’s Doc plays the accidental hero perfectly, his expressions capturing the unfettered nature of the stoner PI and translating Pynchon’s humor onto the big screen with ease. Inherent Vice is a must-see for anyone looking for contradiction. It’s an escapist film that makes you think – although your thoughts will take the shapeless, illogical form of dreaming.” Amanda Festa, Editor — Read the review

Prepare with this look at the mainstream appeal of Fifty Shades and the history of erotica in literature.

“When looking for hints of what the film Fifty Shades of Grey might hold, we can look at the many erotica film adaptations that came before. Fanny Hill, which began the fine tradition of writing pornography in English, was made into at least five adaptations. The lascivious The History of Tom Jones was made into four films and an opera. Roughly 300 year later, they fail to titillate in quite the same way as the books (probably because no one give NC-17 ratings to literature, however smutty).” Haley Houseman, Contributor — Read the article

*

That wraps this year’s Fauxscars! What was your favorite adaptation of 2014? Let us know in the comments!

*Whiplash was not nominated for a Fauxscar since it was adapted from a short film, not a literary work.

With a lively social media presence and supportive atmosphere, McNally Jackson is out to save the bookstore scene in Manhattan. As high rents and slow business have forced older, well respected bookstores to close on the island, McNally Jackson thrives downtown in the Village. The space is perpetually busy, filled with bibliophiles of all ages and tribes. You’ll be lucky if you can snag a table in their small but well stocked cafe area, appointed with book-themed mobiles and furnishings. Even if you do manage to get a seat, don’t plan on camping out. McNally Jackson is resolutely wifi-free; anyone working on their computer or device is typing away madly, or reading offline. Instead of checking your email, use the cafe to comb through a tall stack of the many publications the cities “friendliest book mongers” have to offer.

On the first floor, aside from the cafe, readers can find fiction organized by the author’s country of origin. An excellent section dedicated to literary travel writing and travel guides takes up the back of the store. Not just stocked with Lonely Planet and other standard guides, there are shelves of literary travel writing from prestigious anthologies and individual writers. Find everything from classics Pico Iyer and Paul Theroux to more unusual pieces like Alain de Botton’s Art of Travel. Other sections upstairs include a well curated selection of contemporary fiction, nonfiction, and art books, as well as one of the best selections of imported and independent magazines in the city.

Downstairs features a large kids’ section, including a small playhouse which doubles as puppet theater, and a variety of book shelves organized by grade. Aside from housing the poetry, science fiction, and nonfiction books, the downstairs also has a large worktable for patrons to use. The community-focused space is host to children’s readings, and various literary events including author lectures and signings.

Alongside the bookstore, the space houses a cafe and something quite unique: an Espresso bookpress, allowing patrons to print books on demand, as well as self-publish literature in small or large runs. The bookstore stocks a selection of these next to the press, and elsewhere in the store you can find large selections of chapbooks and small literature. If you can’t visit the store in person, the website is filled with recommendations and lists. Thanks to the savvy of its owner, Sarah McNally, the store is also active on social media sites such as Tumblr and Facebook, making it a great resource to the remote reader.